[quanticle]

When was the last time you had to debug an IRQ conflict? I remember when "Plug and Play" was derisively nicknamed "Plug and Pray". Today, it all just works. When I'm assembling a computer, I don't have to set jumpers. I don't have to fiddle with making sure the boot drive is at the end of the IDE cable rather than the middle. I can just snap all the pieces together like Lego, hit the power button, and be assured that I'll get a bootable system (assuming, of course, that I haven't been a dolt and forgotten to plug the video card power cable in).

When was the last time you had an application blue-screen/bugcheck/kernel panic your machine? Yes, Windows still blue-screens from time to time, but over the past decade, I've found that 100% of my blue-screens have been caused by faulty drivers, rather than application code or bugs in the OS itself. This wasn't always the case. I remember, on Windows 98, there was one particular game that my brother had (I think it was Reader Rabbit), which would repeatedly and reliably blue-screen the machine when we got to a certain level. I haven't seen any errors like that in more than decade. And even the driver blue-screens are getting better. I remember not too long ago, my Windows PC's monitor blinked off, then came back. When I looked in Event Viewer, I saw that the GPU driver had crashed and had been automatically restarted. This is something that still causes kernel panics on Linux and MacOS, but Windows just shrugs it off and keeps on chugging.

With regards to Linux, when was the last time you had to mess with xorg.conf? Wifi drivers? WPA supplicant? I remember when I had to download the Windows drivers for my wireless card, extract the binary blobs, compile NDISWrapper, and then pray that I'd set everything up correctly, before unplugging the Ethernet cable to test whether my wifi was working. Now? I browse Hacker News while Linux is installing, because wifi drivers have been part of the kernel for years.

As for programming tools, they're more stable, robust, and widely available than ever. When was the last time you had to pay for a compiler, interpreter or language runtime? When was the last time GCC or LLVM crashed? Today one can write code in C, C++, Java, Python, Go, Rust, and a plethora of other languages... all for free, even on Windows! This is a huge improvement from the bad old days when your choices were to either pay for Borland or pay for Visual Studio. And as for web programming, do you really pine for the days when your only option for a backend language was a collection of perl scripts in `cgi-bin`?

The one regression, in my opinion, is with communication software. We used to have open (or "open-enough" i.e. reverse engineered) protocols that enabled multi-protocol, multi-platform clients such as Pidgin. That world is gone. Our communications are now siloed into proprietary, hostile software stacks, such as Slack, Google Meet and Teams. And our personal communications are siloed between Discord, WhatsApp, and the multifarious other messenger apps that we have to install in order to communicate with that one person who refuses to use anything else.

But other than comms, has software improved? I have a hard time arguing otherwise.

[eimrine]

> I don't have to fiddle with making sure the boot drive is at the end of the IDE cable rather than the middle.

But now we are having USB-c.

[M95D]

> When was the last time you had to debug an IRQ conflict?

Never. But in my home server I have 4, sometimes 5 RAID controllers. Some combinations of RAID/AHCI/IDE modes won't work due to lack of resources. I presume it's about I/O addresses - the boot message is not really informative compared to Device Manager. I regret not taking a picture of the error message. The system won't even pass the POST when this happens.

> I remember when "Plug and Play" was derisively nicknamed "Plug and Pray". Today, it all just works.

No, it doesn't! I just plugged in an old webcam and there's no driver. It's the exact same "Pray"... well, not really. I don't pray. These days I default to the "It's not going to work" mindset.

> When I'm assembling a computer, I don't have to set jumpers.

How is that a good thing? Overclock something, system won't boot, you have to reset the CMOS and loose all settings, including the boot order.

> I don't have to fiddle with making sure the boot drive is at the end of the IDE cable rather than the middle.

No, you could have used the jumpers, but I think you hated them too much to let them help you. I wish I had the jumpers now. Every time I insert or remove a SATA HDD from the rack I have to redo the boot order.

> I can just snap all the pieces together like Lego, hit the power button, and be assured that I'll get a bootable system (assuming, of course, that I haven't been a dolt and forgotten to plug the video card power cable in).

And then you notice that the system won't recognize the CPU without a BIOS/UEFI update, which you can't do because it won't boot unless it recognises the CPU. Then the OS is installed with IDE drivers and you can't switch to AHCI without major OS surgery.

> When was the last time you had an application blue-screen/bugcheck/kernel panic your machine? Yes, Windows still blue-screens from time to time, but over the past decade, I've found that 100% of my blue-screens have been caused by faulty drivers, rather than application code or bugs in the OS itself.

These days there's no blue screen or error. Apps just won't start (click the icon and it does nothing), opened apps suddenly close without any error (just dissappear from the screen), system suddenly reboots, or won't wake up from sleep, or an update makes the system unbootable or stuck in a boot cycle.

> This wasn't always the case. I remember, on Windows 98, there was one particular game that my brother had (I think it was Reader Rabbit), which would repeatedly and reliably blue-screen the machine when we got to a certain level. I haven't seen any errors like that in more than decade. And even the driver blue-screens are getting better. I remember not too long ago, my Windows PC's monitor blinked off, then came back. When I looked in Event Viewer, I saw that the GPU driver had crashed and had been automatically restarted. This is something that still causes kernel panics on Linux and MacOS, but Windows just shrugs it off and keeps on chugging.

True. This part is better.

> With regards to Linux, when was the last time you had to mess with xorg.conf? Wifi drivers? WPA supplicant? I remember when I had to download the Windows drivers for my wireless card, extract the binary blobs, compile NDISWrapper, and then pray that I'd set everything up correctly, before unplugging the Ethernet cable to test whether my wifi was working. Now? I browse Hacker News while Linux is installing, because wifi drivers have been part of the kernel for years.

I did most of the enumerated items this week.

> But other than comms, has software improved? I have a hard time arguing otherwise.

It did improve a little in stability, at a very very high cost of user's money, time and privacy: waiting for stuff to open, commands to get processed, buying ever faster and more expensive hardware to do basically the exact same things as 20 years ago, only slower, and not because of the 56K modem.

It's because of people always wanting the latest newest stuff that good old software gets abandoned. See: IRC, FTP, Opera Presto, websites without JS, single-user OS, also hardware: ethernet on laptops, headphone jacks on phones.

[quanticle]

I'm not going to respond to your points one by one. My overall response to you is that the system you're describing, with its multitude of RAID controllers, ancient webcam, overclocked CPU, etc, etc, wouldn't even have been possible to put together in the '90s. You'd have ended up spending all your time debugging random crashes and failures, and figuring out how to get stuff working. Whereas today, it's usable and functional and, while it still might have issues, it at least all works most of the time.

As far as the system not recognizing newer processors without a BIOS update, that was also true in the '90s. It's just that, back then, things changed so much, you'd just end up tossing the entire motherboard when it came time to install a new CPU, and you'd "upgrade" the BIOS that way.